"I'll never be a birder"
Working to free a trapped owl after a summer of misadventure long ago in Alaska.
Dear Readers,
This is the sordid tale of why I love birds, but I’ve sworn for decades that “I’ll never be a birder.” I’m told this post is unpleasant to read and not “on brand.” It mentions sexual harassment and people who killed birds, but possibly ends well. If that’s your thing, read on. You may find a more multidimensional Amanda here than usual.
— Amanda
In the mist-drenched landscape of Southeast Alaska over 20 years ago, I was finishing a hike back from a cabin that looked out over the Inside Passage. Below me wove a mosaic of massive glaciers, milky rivers, placid ocean, stinking bogs, and dense rainforest.
On this hike, a black bear dripped along up the hill from me, nose down in the heather. I carefully descended slippery planks crossing soggy muskeg. If I’d fallen, I’d have been shin-deep in murky water, even though I was traversing a hillside.
Pink stain mottled my hands. Like the bear, I’d stuffed myself along the way with blueberry and salmonberry. From the rainbow heather, the trail led into the forest again, moss-covered branches of mature Sitka spruce dimming the light and creating calm shadows.
I knew from my birding co-workers that the marbled murrelet, a bird nearly extinct in the Lower 48, could nest in these old giants. But that wasn’t the bird watching me that day.
Things were drier under the forest canopy, and I hopped along with some speed now. These were the days when I pressed “fast-forward” often, instead of “slow down” or “rewind.” So I’m surprised I saw that first one, a burst of ghost grey, soaring through the branches above, silent as mist.
I gasped. A huge ball of fluff stared down at me from a branch far above. I’d never seen an owl before, much less one so enormous. With so much fluff, it was clearly a fledgling. Thinking back, this was the first bird I ever saw in my life. That is, it was the first bird I appreciated for the beautiful spirit it was, showering me in gentle magic, piercing my heart with its glare.
But then, oh gosh! Another flew to join it! Its massive wings made no sound as it sped through the trees, a spirit in flight, an angel dousing me with delight. Now, two great-horned owl fledglings stared at me from the branch far above. My heart skipped a beat and I stood stiff, pinching my lips shut so I wouldn’t shout with excitement.
The final blow of ecstasy came when the third fledgling swooped in from beyond nowhere and joined its siblings on the branch.
I don’t know how long I stood there. The astonishing silence of their wings and glares, and my intense feeling that I, too, should not make one sound, have never left me. These birds were bursting with power. They were already both wise and curious. Not a whiff of vulnerability emanates from a great horned owl, even a fledgling.
From the moss-covered branch, three strong owls, white down still exploding from their plumage, calmly checked out the wet redheaded girl frozen on the forest floor below, clutching her heart and crying like she’d seen the Mother Mary.
This visitation was a spiritual avalanche for my 22-year-old soul, having grown up in cities since leaving Hawaii at age 10. Peeling back the fronds of such abundant nature, peering into its mystery, stepping into its wildness, and finding such euphoria. I could easily grow addicted to this.
I’m so sorry, but the tone of this piece will now take a turn for the worse. I feel I must warn you. The owls were angels. And where there are angels, there are always demons.
I knew they were great horned owls because I’d been living with bird trackers all summer while working for the U.S. Forest Service as an interpretive ranger at the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau. Working four days for 10 hours allowed me three full days to wander the rest of the week. Even on workdays, getting off at 7 p.m. never prevented us from fishing at midnight, hauling in 20-pound ragged dog salmon — strays from the hatchery. Some we ate and some we smoked.
My well-worn copy of National Geographic’s “Field Guide to the Birds of North America” still sits on my bookshelf, purchased my first week in Alaska. My three roommates that summer were completely insane bird enthusiasts. I only ended up living with them because I had to leave the party house of interpretive rangers. One of them had crawled into my bed uninvited. That Grease-Ball was a birder, too, and I didn’t know it yet, but when I switched housing arrangements, I moved in with his girlfriend, the Wicked Witch of Mist Nets, or Bird Killer for short.
Of the three, Kahn is the one I’d love to see again someday. I can still picture him the day he arrived.
The door flew open with a bang and filling its frame was the biggest guy I’d seen in a while, a huge grin, sparkling black eyes, big black hair, and guns. So many guns. Five different rifles radiating out from his back. They kept him from coming through the door.
“Hi! I’m Kahn!!”
He hefted a giant bag of guns down onto the carpet in front of him. Yeah, more guns. He pulled all the guns off his shoulders and neatly stacked them on the floor. And before I could think, “How many guns does one person need?” he came right at me and shook my hand. The stifling living room I’d been sharing with two awkward bird trackers for a week finally filled with life. I’d never met a gun owner, but I was so happy to meet Kahn.
Kahn was a Sikh raised by professors at the University of California, Berkeley. He ended up at UC Humboldt and — rejecting his Berkeley upbringing — found his clan with the hunter and logger types. I swear to you, Kahn had same boundless vivacity as Gurdeep Pandher, the dancing social media Sikh, but with a whole lot of guns.
Kahn came to Juneau to track northern goshawks1 for the Forest Service. He was going to be bushwacking all summer through devil’s club with a megaphone shouting goshawk mating calls so the agency could get a better idea of their density in the Tongass National Forest. If you don’t know what devil’s club is and the name is not descriptive enough, imagine a chest-high, thorn-covered, man-eating bog plant, something you might encounter in Jurassic Park. In Southeast Alaska, if you’re hiking off trail, you’re either bushwacking through devil’s club or knee deep in a swamp surrounded by skunk cabbage, another plant whose name should suffice to conjure its essential sensory qualities.
Sadly, this daily bushwacking slowly but noticeably dampened Kahn’s enthusiasm as the summer progressed. The goshawks never returned their calls.
Kahn rescued me when he busted through that door. Because the two other roommates in our cramped two-bedroom apartment already greatly disliked each other. Kahn is the only name I remember from that summer. The other two were the Bird Killing Witch and Quiet One.
Witch shared a room with me. She and Quiet One were a team but she had seniority. They woke up at 3 a.m. every morning to put out mist nets to catch and count tiny birds. Quiet One was a schoolteacher from the Midwest who loved birds so much he decided to spend the summer away from his new wife counting birds in Alaska. He arrived without a trace of insanity, but that ruthless summer would not leave even him untouched.
I call her Bird Killer for two reasons. First, she routinely left her mist nets for too long and, according to Quiet One, killed a bird or two every day. Once trapped in the net, they froze to death in the Alaska dawn, unable to fly to keep warm. Second, one day when she killed off two ruby-crowned kinglet parents with her mist net, she searched out their nest and brought all four baby kinglets back to the apartment to hand raise and hopefully set free. The chicks were almost fledged. Four tiny, precious emeralds with heartbeats. We were all tasked with keeping an eye on them and feeding them in the terrarium she set up in front of the blinds in the living room. There was never a crack in her confidence that they would make it. But there was nothing to warm them, and she was hardly ever there. She was always either out killing more birds or hanging out with Grease-Ball collecting fiddleheads for dinner.
Unfortunately, the kinglet chicks all died, one after the other, over the next several weeks.
By the end of the summer, Quiet One was a seething mess who’d composed a massive whistleblowing letter to the USFS about his bird-murdering manager. Before we all returned to the Lower 48, he sat next to me at our campsite in Denali National Park, surrounded by pink clouds and vast tundra, tears in his eyes, shaking his head, saying, “I spent my summer killing birds.”
I wasn’t supposed to be living in that apartment with the bird trackers. I was supposed to be in a house with the other interpretive rangers, co-workers, four of us, two guys and two girls who would answer tourists’ questions at the Mendenhall Glacier. My own descent into insanity involved listening to the questions of thousands of everyday Americans coming off the cruise ships, most of them overweight and undereducated:
“Are there penguins up there on the glacier?”
No, penguins live south of the Equator.
“Do polars bear live on the glacier?”
No, polar bears live in the Arctic.
“Is that black stuff on the glacier an oil spill?”
No, oil tankers can’t get onto glaciers.
Grease-Ball ranger who harassed me out of the first house was an avid birder. We initially hit it off, I thought platonically. He’d frequently talked about his girlfriend, also an avid birder, who would arrive any day now in Juneau. So I thought it was safe to be friendly with this person. We took some hikes and looked at unfurling fern buds that were going to taste like asparagus for dinner. I was missing my guy back in California and he couldn’t wait for his girlfriend to arrive for the summer, so I thought it was OK to be nice and smile and take a few hikes. Right? No. Because men think with a certain body part as frequently as women convince themselves that men aren’t thinking with that body part.
Before the shit hit the fan, he introduced me to the birds of North America book and I read it cover to cover.
I didn’t make it long in that house because he grew increasingly friendly and I wasn’t interested. One night he crossed the line. He cornered me in the bathroom we all shared with an unmistakable look in his eye. I said, “no” very clearly. A few minutes later, in the bedroom I shared with the other woman ranger, the other two, drunk, were making out in her bed. I tried to go to sleep but who should come in the door but the man who’d already received a firm “no.” Grease-Ball thought I wanted to snuggle, too. He was swiftly told how gross he was and to get the fuck off.
We never spoke after that except for a brief conversation in which he told me, even as the Forest Service was stamping their investigation on his permanent record, that he was “not sorry.”
After I told management that he crawled into my bed, they moved me into the house with the bird trackers. Soon, Grease-Ball’s long-awaited girlfriend arrived, and she was going to be my roommate.
The Wicked Witch of Mist Nets was overconfident and condescending. We were driving past the harbor one day and I called the birds “sea gulls.” She corrected me. “They’re gulls. There’s no such thing as a sea gull.”
I fingered the huge, sharp fishhook in my lap, thought of the dead baby kinglets, and wished I could gouge her eye out.
She and I slept in the same room all summer but rarely spoke. It was awkward. It helped that our schedules were mismatched. One night, we were eating dinner on the couch and she started yelling and cursing from the kitchen. She was tugging on a plastic cutting board, but it wouldn’t move off the counter. She didn’t know it had melted onto the glass stovetop she had left on. The scene blew up as we watched. Her ponytail whipped around like a serpent. She was going to wrestle that cutting board into submission and she finally pulled hard enough that it popped up, along with the stovetop. Shattered glass flew everywhere. Half the stovetop was unusable for the rest of the summer. She broke everything she touched.
Whenever birds came up, I was the outsider, the clueless one. And Bird Killer was always talking about birds, often lecturing to the air with a high-pitched voice. None of us were listening, the contradiction too painful for our ears. We stomached it while looking to Kahn for relief, a gleam always in his eye. He found the world utterly joyful and entertaining. Kahn was my savior. He was loud and beaming and joking all the time, ever cheerful through all the sogginess. He played up the redneck, gun-toting bit to full effect every single chance he got, the perfect foil to the uptight witch and her sad underling. Every night, Quiet One suffered along with us for a short while, quickly eating and retreating to his room to review his bird lists, read, and write letters to his wife.
At some point I pieced together that Bird Killer simply talked too much and wasn’t aware enough of other people. Her continuous verbal vomit was the cause of constant delays in the early morning work and hiking between the mist nets. It was why the nets were hanging too long with their trapped birds. All her words were killing the birds.
By the way, since he was hiking cross-country every day, Kahn was required to carry a gun. Because of grizzly bears, not many people hike the backcountry without guns in Alaska. I came across large piles of bear scat every trail I hiked.
Kahn had a partner, a second person who also slogged through the devil’s club with the goshawk megaphone, someone who outranked him but who was also increasingly miserable as the summer progressed. They came home tattered, full of thorns, and half dead every night. I’ll call the partner Jaded.
I didn’t hang out with Jaded that often but eventually got to know him a little. Kahn and Quiet One and I started planning to catch a plane to Anchorage to check out Denali before we all headed home. Things were wrapping up in Juneau.
One day, sitting on a hillside together, Jaded was downtrodden. They hadn’t spotted a single goshawk all summer. The megaphone called again and again and nothing ever answered.
All summer long, all that devil’s club and no goshawks.
I felt pretty bad for the guy.
In my pocket, my hand sought a small package. My guy in California had stuffed it into my backpack on the way up. But being a Georgia girl, I couldn’t smoke California weed. It rendered me useless after one hit.
So I pulled out what was left, a big fat bud, and I handed it to him.
“Do you want this? I can’t take it with me.”
His big brown eyes lit up, like he was seeing me for the first time. Like I was divine. A bringer of gifts through the dense fog.
Nobody working for the federal government, who was required to carry a gun for their job, was supposed to be smoking weed. But come on, he’d traversed hundreds of square miles through the swamps and spines and man-eating plants, for months and months, and came up with nothing. Nothing.
He took it like it was a bag of jewels. I can’t recall anybody ever being so happy to lay their eyes on some bud. It was the least I could do for the poor guy. As for me, I was going home. There was no cure for this unraveling, wild place but to leave it.
That trip to Alaska was not all bad. It was astonishing and magical in many ways. I spent months eating enormous salmon, counting bald eagles by the hundreds, and gazing into the eyes of humpback whales. I watched a group of humpbacks bubble-net feed on herring for hours, and saw orcas at full charge, the dominant male with proud, 10-foot-tall dorsal fin. I danced away a black bear on the beach while camping alone at Glacier Bay National Park. I woke to gunshot, the sound of fishermen shooting a halibut. Alaska is still so incredibly wild. Grizzly bears roamed rainbow tundra at Denali National Park. You have to crane your neck, like you’re looking at the sun, to see the top of Mount Denali, at 20,310 feet. I remember thinking, “This is what the world was like before we ruined it.” At the end of our time there, a wolf squatted and pooped in front of our national park tour bus, a perfect punctuation to the summer.
What is the point of these words?
These are my memories of some of the first bird enthusiasts I knew. Weird. Overconfident. Lecturing. Harassing. Depressed. So sad. Crazed. Condescending. Always correct. Dumb. Alienating. Carelessly murdering. Doused with a preachy, rabid religiosity. Know the birds. Know the names. Correct people who don’t know the names. Trap birds. Kill birds. Never acknowledge you killed any birds. Keep lists. Check lists. Check on your lists more often than your people. Never apologize.
Except for Kahn, I’ve forgotten their names. They are caricatures to me. Especially the slaughtering Witch. Her tone, all summer long, grated on our bullied psyches, while bird after bird died under her incompetent fingers.
I’ve always said to myself, after that summer, that I would never be a birder.
I’ve long understood the addicting euphoria of bird encounters. When I see an interesting bird that I don’t recognize, I spend a couple of hours trying to figure out what it is. I write about saving birds all the time! But no, sorry, I don’t do that birding thing. “I’ll never be a birder.”
Then, last year, I started writing on Substack and reading nature writers. Wow. What an interesting sensation floated across my neurons when I found so many birders posting such beautiful content. I couldn’t help but like what they were publishing.
A little tug-of-war began to take place in my brain. These birders weren’t the frazzled ones I’d known, people who knew bird names but who’d forgotten, or never knew, how to treat other humans. These Substack writers were kind, gentle bird whisperers. Seducers of birds to their cameras, writing stories that pulled back the curtains of my heart, reached in, and squeezed till I cried.
Could I have gotten birders all wrong?
Finding such eloquent storytellers prompted me to write a first draft of this piece over a year ago. But I buried it because the tone was so odd and off base. Last week, I dug up the draft after reading Bill Davison’s recent essay, “Birdwatching Is Having a Moment - And We Need to Talk About It,” which has since gone viral.
That night, an owl came to me in a dream. It was hunting rodents in a dim underground tunnel, doing very well, when suddenly it was caught in the talons of something else, a dark, twisted thing. Writhing in the grip of this shadow, the owl turned its orange eyes to me, imploring me to save it. I woke in a sweat, tearing off the sheets, heart pounding. I wracked my brain: What could possibly pin down an owl?
I knew the answer before long.
I couldn’t escape the answer. That week, suddenly everyone was writing about owls, everywhere I turned.
Here’s the thing: So what? I was harassed by a birder then bullied by his birder girlfriend all summer. It was bizarre. I moved on fairly easily and made the best of the summer. Worse things have happened to people. I never thought there was that much trauma or PTSD involved. But the refrain had always been there: “I will never be a birder.” Whenever I encountered birders in my life, those words would repeat, like a broken record, in the back of my mind: “NOPE! I’ll never be a birder.”
It was happening subconsciously. Deep in there. A constant warning.
There’s something funny about it to me. Like, honestly, who doesn’t like birders? I can hear readers thinking, “Huh? Why would you allow a couple of bad apples make you reject an entire tribe of kind and soft, slow-moving, binocular-toting wildlife whisperers?”
But there’s something not so funny, either. And it woke me up a few times and brought me to tears this week, trying to process this, understand it, and write it in a way that would make sense.
“I will never be a birder.”
What purpose do those words serve?
All this time, those owls I’d met in the woods were also forgotten.
Who forgets a visit from angels?
The dark threads we weave to protect ourselves, wrapping around the things we love, like vines over a hidden cozy cottage in a dim, dripping forest.
Can I disentangle the dark threads from the light and weave a new narrative?
I’d like to see a few more beautiful birds in the woods. I might take my binoculars. I might walk slowly. I might whisper when I see one, hope it doesn’t fly away for just a moment.
UGH. I’m supposed to end it and send it but I taste bile. I’m physically sick. My stomach is in knots. This is so hard. This is not the post I was going to write. It was going to be darkly funny and sarcastic and only hint at something. Now the final five words are boiling up and scalding me. They’re tearing at my neurons. I’ve spewed more than 4,000 words here and none of them matter. Only a few matter, and I haven’t typed them yet. These unsayable five words didn’t arise until this moment. I’m gagging. I’m turning away and throwing it all in the trash. No, this can’t be how it ends. This hurts. This is not a tender weaving activity! Don’t listen to that weaving bit. The dark threads are a mess and don’t untangle. My fingers are shaking. Whatever this is, it’s terrible, awful torture. It’s a ripping, shredding, savage battle. I’ve slipped shin-deep into a puddle of tears thinking of placing these last alphabet symbols together and pressing “send.” I’m so full of doubt.
But the horizon glows pink with light. The talons have loosed their grip as I name what they are. The words enter my mind, unspoken, untyped, but they have meaning and consequence. A droplet of truth on a parched tongue. I can see freedom and it’s hard to turn away. I can feel it. It’s soft and sweet and bright and powerful. And it’s just a start. An opening. I can try out these new words and see how they fit from here.
It’s going to be OK.
I’m freeing the owl from my dream with these words:
I COULD BE A BIRDER.
About Earth Hope:
Earth Hope is a solutions-based journalism project that highlights environmental success stories to inspire action. I’m Amanda Royal, a former newspaper reporter and current eco-news junkie. Read more about this project and what inspired it. I aggregate news under my “hopeful headlines,” conduct original reporting and interviews, and share occasional personal narratives. Visit earthhope.substack.com for more stories.
This was before goshawks were classified into two different species, American or Eurasian. Previously, they were known collectively as northern goshawks.
Nature, of tooth and claw is not pretty. And you survived some pretty weird birds as apartment mates. They were lister birders, alone with their lists. Listers will travel a great distance. Observe their destination bird, more interested in the trophy checkmark than the bird itself, and leave, ignoring the marvelous avifauna all about. The other birders do not keep species counts. For us, it's the quality of the interactions with birds, not the quantity. Keep on birding at your own pace. The best bird writing tells us something about both the bird and people, allowing us to relate. Write on.
I don't care if this is "off brand," it's great writing. Thanks for sharing these formative times with us. I don't call myself a birder either, because I can't obsess about one thing that much. I love watching birds, but I don't give a fuck if you call a Herring Gull or a Laughing Gull a sea gull. I'm chummy with both a former copy chief at Random House and the author of the largest dictionary of slang... we can call these birds sea gulls. Just not on our eBird checklists.